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Guest opinion: Flying the unfriendly skies

By Elizabeth McKenzie

Posted:
09/04/2013 01:00:00 AM MDT

Remember back in the good old days when we could book an economy plane ticket and know that we'd be getting a hot meal on the flight? We'd be able to choose chicken, beef or the vegetarian meal. We could get to the airport an hour early, instead of two and leave our shoes on going through security. Those days are long gone. Now we get no food except peanuts or the chance to purchase over-priced snack boxes. On the plane we get a lousy complimentary beverage and we get to pay up to $25 per checked bag -- twice on a round trip ticket. We might be charged to choose our seats, or we can pay to upgrade to "economy plus." The nice little extras no longer exist and the hidden fees keeping getting tacked on to the bill.

One thing that hasn't changed with flying is the fact that delays happen, weather happens, mechanical issues come up and workers go on strike... and when these things happen, your weekend can be turned upside down faster than a cup of water on a tray table during turbulence.

Your flight may be cancelled or delayed for safety reasons: a snowstorm -- or thunderstorm. Even if you can't see the snow falling as you stare out the airport window, trapped like a fish in a glass bowl, there could be snow where you are supposed to land. Weather happens. And when weather happens, airlines have a teensy little clause called "the Act of God" clause and they like that clause. A lot. Why? Because when flights are delayed or cancelled for "weather" the airline is not accountable, not even if your connecting flight was cancelled as you were in mid-air, completely unaware of the cancellation, and you arrive for a red-eye flight with two young children to a catch a plane that isn't there. Or, if it is, it isn't going anywhere. That's what happened to me last weekend while flying Delta from Denver to Burlington, Vt., connecting in LaGuardia in New York.

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After a completely smooth and turbulence-free, on-time arrival into LGA I turned on my on my phone to read an email from Delta informing that my connecting flight at 10:25 p.m. had been cancelled. We had been automatically re-booked for the following day with an extra leg added. New York to Detroit to Burlington. Makes sense. Wait. What? That wouldn't work for us! I rushed the girls off the plane to customer service.

With a cancelled flight, I had expected a madhouse at the customer service desk but it was quiet. I immediately asked why our flight had been cancelled. "Weather."

"But where?" I insisted, "Where is this weather? It's not raining here. My parents' flight landed just fine in Burlington an hour ago. There's no weather there." No one could tell me. They gestured lamely towards the ceiling, swishing their hands back and forth, "It can be anywhere, you know, up there. In the flight path, or you know, wherever." And so began my education on "the rights of passengers vs. the responsibilities of the airlines." I was told we could not be comped a room, even though I had a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old with me, because of the Act of God Clause. Had the cancellation been mechanical in nature, I would be shuttled to a hotel and possibly given food vouchers for the next day. A night in a hotel plus another day of airport-priced food was not in my budget. Our other option was to sleep in the vinyl chairs in the baggage claim area, since we could not sleep in the terminal for security reasons.

The girls and I began a midnight trek around the airport in search of someone who cared that we were stranded, exhausted and majorly inconvenienced. That's when my sister emailed me a link to an article about Mitchell Berns, who had sued Delta for a bogus weather cancellation in 2009 and won by default. Though his Delta plane was grounded due " weather" he was able to book a last minute flight on another airline that left and landed at the same time that his original Delta flight should have. In the interview he cautioned travelers not to blindly accept the "weather" cancellation because it's an easy way for an airline to get out of costly (yet compassionate) compensations for it's customers. After all, how would I know if there was mechanical difficulty or if there really was a rogue and malingering thunderstorm somewhere in the flight path? I wouldn't. Which is why I wish I had known about sites like wunderground.com that can show real time radar images of weather events, like precipitation, wind, lightening, snow, hail and more.

Have you ever heard the old saying "Know your rights?" Well, in the case of flying commercial airlines, you can throw those rights out the airplane window. If you're being given information that you have no way of cross-checking with irrefutable data, then you have no rights. So the next time you are told your flight is cancelled due to weather, unless you see three feet of snow outside, challenge the agents. As a Delta Facebook Representative told me: "We spend considerable time with weather models through our meteorology teams to determine what areas may be affected and when. With any weather events, they can be unpredictable." I'm glad to hear that because the airline should be more than able to tell passengers exactly where the "weather" is occurring and how it is affecting their travel -- even if they have to trace it six flights back to a plane grounded in Miami for a thunderstorm.

Will being informed of this unfortunately common occurrence get you treated well or comped a room when stranded overnight? It might. Even if it's only because the agent just wants you to stop waving your smartphone in her face and yelling "Show me the weather!"

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